Russia (bbabo.net), - Comics, they are also graphic novels, can not only be looked at, but also translated into a theatrical plane. This, in fact, took advantage of the Tyumen youth from the center "Cosmos". The match that "lit" the performance-installation "SMOKE" was the book "Survilo" with black-and-white pictures by Olga Lavrentieva from St. Petersburg. Since last May, the project has been presented twice in Tyumen and once taken to Moscow to the festival of contemporary art "Territory. Kids". With a presentation in the historical park "Russia - my history" the second season started the other day. Working time - exactly a month.

Olga Lavrentieva is the granddaughter of Valentina Survilo. Poles, blockaders, daughters of an enemy of the people, whose fate, of course, is one of many similar, but still unique in its kind: having lost her father (he was shot), almost dying in Bashkir exile, and then in Leningrad ringed by the Nazis, Survilo found strength to get a profession, start a family, pull out documents justifying parents. Valya had a long road ahead of her. True, every day she lived with an indescribable feeling of fear, which she never eradicated ...

- We read Survilo with my daughter. And then I thought: not a single theater in Russia has staged a performance based on a comic book, which is quite surprising. No one bet, but Tyumen will. Since there is no troupe in Cosmos - it is a platform for the growth of residents, we began to look for a team capable of embodying the work in the form of an installation, - says Alexandrina Shakleeva, head of the theater center.

The challenge was accepted by director Vlad Tutak and artist Zhenya Isaeva from St. Petersburg. To talk to teenagers about the war, the team took an immersive approach. The format is not new, but very popular: today's youth are now talking about historical topics not in the language of encyclopedias, but through guidebooks, but at the same time they give freedom of action. If you want, go through the exhibition clockwise. Or vice versa. Open lockers, pick up, look, listen, take pictures, scan QR codes for additional immersion in the material, make stories, broadcast live. Do something, just don't be indifferent.

"SMOKE", a metaphor for the military era, is 16 conditional stops in the biography of Valentina Vikentievna. Refrigerator, for example. You open the door, inside, as expected, the glass sides of the jars shine. Not with salted milk mushrooms and cherry jam, but with belts, wallpaper scraps, mugs. How you can eat grass and a trouser accessory is not clear to our students. And new, not bookish, but visual knowledge penetrates them. Of course, the authors deliberately exaggerated, even brought to the point of absurdity (well, what kind of belts are in the container - they were simply eaten, not salted, just as they were not kept in the refrigerator, because it simply did not exist). Critics of the "Golden Mask" appreciated the fusion of sound, text and visualization - last fall the project was longlisted for a theater award with a note about "an important attempt to talk to children in a different way."

In a different way - it means without conservation, said Pavel Belyavsky, director of the department for public relations, communications and youth policy of the Tyumen region. Deep and penetrating, as it can be done only with the help of art tools, says the head of the regional department of culture, Elena Mayer.

"SMOKE" to everything is easy in sight. Literally. Installation weighing 300 kg is included in one cargo GAZelle. Quite suitcase, very suitable for moving around the world. So, in April she will go to Omsk for the Chat festival, in May she will probably stay in Tyumen to meet with the author of the comic book Olga Lavrentieva, in August she will become a guest of the contemporary art center in Yekaterinburg. Back in 2020, the Germans, French, Poles, and Swedes wanted to translate and publish Survilo. Here, a performance from Western Siberia would come in handy.

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